Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Terence McKenna: We Are Monkeys Trying to Understand Reality


 Recently, I've been listening to many talks & lectures, and I just finished a compilation of Terence McKenna, called "True Hallucinations". It was a great collection of audio, video, and stories from the mind of perhaps my favorite speaker & thinker.



At one point in this video, he has a great bit that I've heard him ask in other variations, questioning our ability as simians to truly comprehend the reality we live in.

The quote comes at 2:27:10 in the video:

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"Ultimately what you're thrown back on is that you are a monkey! 
It's nothing to be ashamed of, but on the other hand, it's nothing to write out of the equation either... You're a monkey, for God's sake, and yet you're asking to understand the nature of reality! What would you think of a squirrel that ran around with that as a goal?"

 - Terence McKenna
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 This is an example of Terence's great wit & insight that allowed him to expand the minds of so many people during his life, and even more after his death. 

It echoes another quote of his, that I posted in one of the very early entries in this blog, waaay back in 2005:

The Monkey Buddha Archives:

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 "For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe, the absurdity of that assertion would be self-evident, but in our case we make an exception."

 - Terence McKenna
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Also highly relevant- the totally crazy & awesome animation based on McKenna's ideas, Stoned Ape Theory:

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